A great chance to see some of the amazing work from this year’s MDes Sound for the Moving Image, MSc Medical Visualisation and Human Anatomy and MSc International Heritage Visualisation students at the GSA post-graduate degree show. Starting tomorrow (Saturday) and running until Friday the 12th of September. Also a good opportunity to explore the GSA’s fantastic new Reid building.

The GSA’s Graduate Degree Show offers a public showcase for the full range of graduate work undertaken at the institution. The 2014 Graduate Degree Show will feature work by graduating students across a wide variety of disciplines across architecture, design, fine art and digital.

Working with Hidden Heritage and local community volunteers, Clara was interested in particular in methods accessible at low cost to local community groups that would be strong enough to support the digitization of gravestone and yet be powerful and accurate enough to help uncover hidden detail and support long term archive and conservation projects.

Her results were little short of breath-taking – for example, some of the stones are very badly weathered leaving almost none of the original inscriptions visible to the eye. This can be a significant challenge for heritage groups trying to identify the individuals buried below. Stone 28 at BallyHennan is one of the more badly weathered stones:

Stone 28 at BallyHennan graveyard

Using a method known as RTI (one of two methods Clara used in her project), using around 100 photos and a few hours of additional computer processing significant parts of the inscription suddenly appear:

With classes starting on September 22nd, there is still time to apply for masters study at the Digital Design Studio at The Glasgow School of Art.

All of our courses provide the opportunity for students to learn from and work with leading professionals in the respective field – with in house teams that work closely on research and development projects with the BBC, the NHS, international heritage bodies and major engineering firms.

You can read more about the courses (and find application details) by following the links below

Last term, students on the DDS’ MSc International Heritage Visualisation course worked as a team to scan the Blacader Aisle at Glasgow Cathedral (access arranged with thanks to Historic Scotland) and the surrounding area. 3D laser scanning (using a Leica C10) was performed over a few days, along with a lot of photography to try to obtain some high quality images for use for texture in the final visualisation.

3D laser scan point cloud of Glasgow Cathedral

Students then worked in smaller groups to produce visualisations – this video highlights part of one interactive visualisation running in Unity3D. As well as being able to view the Aisle from different viewpoints, users can also interact with the visualisation to learn more about the windows and the carvings above them.

The aisle (and cathedral) building is incredibly irregular. For example, each window is unique – while all have a similar shape, no two have the same dimensions. The skirt of the aisle likewise has many complex forms. By building this visualisation from data acquired with a 3D laser scanner, we are able to verify the detail to high degree of accuracy – which then has potential to allow models like this to find additional uses in conservation and preservation.

A special exhibition at the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow presents the first complete 3D digital model of the lost tomb of Robert the Bruce.

To create this exhibition, CDDV (a joint venture between the Digital Design Studio and Historic Scotland) contributed scanning and visualisation expertise in a collaboration with the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), The Hunterian (University of Glasgow), the National Museums of Scotland, Fife Cultural Trust and the National Records of Scotland.

The new Definitive Human website went live yesterday. This is a major project to build a medically validated 3D model of the complete human body, with support from a number of partners including NHS Education Scotland, The University of Glasgow, The Scottish Government, and The University of Edinburgh.

The Definitive Human is building a fully 3D, fully interactive, definitive reference for human anatomy for use in education, training and as a tool for medical professionals to support the planning, simulation and rehearsal of medical interventions.

Contact our business development manager, Brian McGeough if you would like to arrange a demonstration:

Over the years many videos work from the DDS has found their way online – it can be quite a task finding them across a range of sites.

Over the past few years, the DDS has been using a channel on Vimeo to publish videos – http://vimeo.com/ddsgsa. Here you can find a mix of student (and alumni) work from recent years.

MDes Sound for the Moving Image student work on Vimeo

The Glasgow School of Art itself publishes on Vimeo, at: http://vimeo.com/glasgowschoolofart – and there is also a DDS channel within this account – here. Currently this is where you’ll find promotional videos for our programmes and videos highlighting the DDS’ commercial and research visualisation work – such as from The Scottish Ten.

Over the next year we’ll see if we can move the videos from the DDS’ own channel over to The Glasgow School of Art Vimeo account. On top of these accounts, however, there are also videos of student work uploaded by students themselves – such as this channel created by animation students some years ago: http://vimeo.com/channels/gsa

And lastly… there is also a DDS channel on YouTube. The focus of this last channel will be on instructional video for current students, but it will also act as a secondary location for posting content (after all, browsing YouTube is how a lot of folk find things). You can find us on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/user/GSADDS/

Broadcast last night, Pipers of the Trenches was a BBC Scotland special on the role of the bag-pipers in the Scottish regiments in World War I. For the programme, historian Michael Stedman worked with the sound specialists at the DDS, Paul Wilson and Ronan Breslin, on recreating the sounds of the battlefield. This was then played back in our Arup Ambisonic sound lab – which provides a full 360 degree audio experience – to create an authentic and terrifying WWI soundscape.

The program will be online for a further six days on BBC iPlayer – here. You can read more about the DDS’ involvement in the making of the programme over on The Glasgow School of Art press blog.